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Installing Installation Manager

Installation Manager (IM) is the IBM management tool that controls and manages the installation of IBM software. The big advantage of IM is that it creates its own library of what it installed and that enables you to easily rollback or update anything it manages.

Let’s start by installing IM – the compressed installers are different for each platform. In Connections101 I will be installing both Linux and Windows components so I will eventually need both versions of IM (beginning agent.installer.”OS”) – extracted and shown below.

From the extracted directory run the file ./install on Linux , this will launch using a graphical interface so you will need to either have a GUI and browser installed or you will need to have set up X11 forwarding to your workstation. There is a silent installer that you can run which won’t use the graphical interface and instead uses a response file to determine who to install. That uses file ./installc and instructions for that are here

Confirm you are installing the correct version of IM. In our case, the newer the better.

This is the location of the Installation Manager files. /opt/IBM/InstallationManager/eclipse by default on Linux C:\Program Files\Installation Manager\eclipse on Windows. Change this to whatever location you want but make sure you will never run out of space on that location, or need to reassign it, as Installation Manager cannot be moved without first uninstalling all the software it manages (like Connections, WebSphere etc!).

The final screen before install confirms the location and details of the program.

On this screen you can see the “Target Location”, including the Package Group Name and the Installation Directory. For each new piece of software IM installs it creates a new Package Group to manage it. This is what is going to allow us to upgrade, rollback, patch and modify later one.

Having installed IM manager we can now use it to install other things.